Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel, BS Murthy [best contemporary novels .txt] 📗

Dhruva to have a last look at Natya, but preferring to retain her pallu-covered face for a memory, he desisted from seeing her decomposed body. Soon, let off after her assurance to cooperate in the investigation, a perplexed Kavya was led out of the police station by Dhruva and Radha.

Upon reaching home, saying that she was too dazed to comprehend the situation as Kavya rushed into her room; left alone with Radha, as Dhruva, reviewed the stunning development with her; she told him that there were questions for Kavya to answer after all. Given that she only had the house key, if not Kavya in burka, who could have led the ill-starred couple into her house? Besides, who would benefit the most with their end than her? After all, was she not craving to begin life afresh, and was it possible with them around her? Moreover, Natya had vouchsafed that Kavya had a cunning mind with criminal impulses; maybe her going to Guntur was a means to acquire an alibi.

As if to free himself from Radha’s brainwash, Dhruva rushed to the Jubilee Hills Police Station to confabulate with Simon, who said that prima facie Kavya remained the sole suspect and revealed that he had also asked his men to review the dossier on her husband’s murder to bring her under the scanner. Then Dhruva assured him that even though she was his client, if he ever scented her criminal hand behind the murders, he didn’t intend to hold her brief for sure. When Simon said that he hoped he would not hinder his investigation as well, assuring him of his bona fide, Dhruva said that he better took him to the Spandan for a second opinion in cracking the case.

On their way, Simon said that as there were no signs of the deceased having moved about in the house, it can be said that they could have died shortly after they got in, at which Dhruva wanted to know whether the door key was found in the house. Then the cop said that it was not traced in spite of a thorough search, for after snaring them in, Kavya could have left with it on the sly. Moreover, as the Godrej lock was any way self-locking, the deceased, known to her any way, wouldn’t have bothered much, even if she had told them that she wanted to take away the key with her for whatever reason. Besides, it was apparent that the kitchen was in disuse for quite a while and the remnants of the packed food found in the dustbin would clearly imply that the couple were there hardly for a day at the most before they met their end.  

When they reached the Spandan, as the guard on duty opened the main door for them, Simon said that, as the police had to force open the door, the Godrej lock in situ was damaged, which he had substituted any way. However, as they got into the house, closing the main door behind them, the detective noticed that it was shorn of its door bolt, so he asked the cop whether he had seen it in its position when they first came in. When the cop confirmed that there was none even then, detective had drawn his attention to the telltale marks of its having been in place until very recently; and then, having scanned the damaged Godrej lock with his magnifying glass, he turned his attention to the drawing room and done with it, he got into the guest room, where a burka was laid on the clothesline.

Having picked up the garment, and finding neither tailor’s label nor dhobi mark on it, the detective had noted its measurements with a tape that he had brought along, at which, as the cop said there were some more of such in the attached toilet of the master bedroom; seeing that burkas could hold the key to the murders, he tallied them all with the one found in the guestroom. When Dhruva turned his attention to the empty wardrobe in the master bedroom, Simon said that as they failed to trace the keys in the house; they broke it open, but found nothing worthwhile therein. However, when asked by Dhruva whether the absence a burka in the wardrobe was recorded in the police panchanama, Simon said though it was not done, he would make good the lapse in his case diary; at that, the detective suggested that he should also record the fact of the missing main door bolt that’s beside sending the original Godrej lock for forensic examination.

Then, as Dhrva began scanning the ground around the guest room window, when Simon said that it was not a case of forcible entry through it; the detective told him that he was in fact looking for signs of an easy passage from there to the main door.  

 Shortly thereafter, when Dhruva said that he had nothing more to look for there, Simon led him back to the police station, where they spent some investigative time together.

 

Chapter 22

Arraigned in Remand

 

That evening, closeting with a nonplussed Kavya, when Dhruva asked her about her house keys, telling him that after her husband’s death, she got the old Godrej lock replaced with a new one, she pulled out one from her purse, and informed him that she kept the other two with a bunch of cupboard keys in her bank locker along with her jewelry. Then when he asked her what for she got the main door bolt removed while replacing the door lock, apparently surprised, she said that it was very much intact even as he led her out of her house to bring her into his that day. Finally, he asked her what made her to leave her burkas on the clothes-line in the master bathroom, she swore that she never wore a burka all her life, and wondered what it was all about. At that, holding her in his reassuring arms, he detailed his findings at Spandan that pointed towards a conspiracy against her, and said that still there was no need for her to lose sleep about that. However, at length, taking hold of that Godrej key for his safekeeping, he bade Kavya good night with sweet dreams.

The next morning, as she volunteered to show him the other keys, as Dhruva drove her to the Andhra Bank in the Jubilee Hills, greeting her warmly; the manger wondered why she became so scarce of late. When she told him the purpose of her visit, he helped her complete the formalities, and after that, she led Dhruva to her locker, from which she retrieved two Godrej keys with a bunch of other keys that she entrusted to him,

Thus having left the bank, as they got into the car, though she looked at him in hope, he said that if the post-mortem report were to come up with some foul play, she can count on Simon to arrest her and press for her custodial interrogation. When she lamented how her past came to haunt her, folding her in his arms, as if in protection, he said that she better obtained an anticipatory bail, before he could bail her out of her predicament. However, she said that she better subjected herself to the due process of law to come clean for she was confident of defending herself in the court. Then, in all admiration, pressing her more closely to him, he assured her that he would get to the bottom of the crime for truth to prevail. However, updating all the murders so to help her fashion her arguments to avoid remand, he dropped her at their place, and headed to the forensic laboratory with those keys.   

However, even before an eager Radha could have a word with Kavya; armed with an arrest warrant and accompanied by a woman constable, Simon had descended upon
9, Castle Hills, and led away Kavya to the Jubilee Hills Police Station for questioning for the post-mortem had revealed that the couple had died of poisoning.

The next day, Dhruva and Radha reached that Nampally Sessions Court well before Simon had produced Kavya before Purushottam Rao, the magistrate, upon which her searching look met Dhruva’s reassuring stare. Then, Jeevan Reddy, the Public Prosecutor, recapped her life from the time of her self-confessed association with the errant couple till their death in Spandan. While Kavya heard him impassively, turning eloquent, he stated that she could have murdered her man at the behest of her lover, who would have brooked no rival to him in her bed, and, later tired of the ruffian; she murdered him in cold blood, so as to get out of the rut she willy-nilly got into. Hence, it was immaterial whether she had a motive or not to murder Natya, as, if left alive, she would have exposed the accused to get the noose. So, as it a case of her neck or Natya’s, her choice should be clear as sky, even to a novice of a defense lawyer.   

What can be more incriminating against the accused, Reddy exhorted, than the very fact that she has had an intimate relationship with all those who died after consuming some slow-acting poison in her house? Besides, there was an eyewitness to testify that a burka-clad woman had entered the house the day the young couple could have been poisoned, who else it could but the accused. The prosecutor further asserted that as the circumstantial evidence pointed towards the involvement of the accused in the murder of not only Pravar and Natya but also Ranjit, her husband, her custodial interrogation was imperative in cracking both the cases. Thereby averring that if let loose, she would be able to tamper with whatever little evidence that could have been left to implicate her, and by way of the final nail on her bail coffin, he had insinuated that she had misused the anticipatory bail granted to her in her husband’s murder case by killing her paramour and his companion; so he sought police custody of her for a fortnight at the least.

Permitted by the court to argue her own case, Kavya owned up the facts of her life as brought out by the prosecution, but pointed out that the Public Prosecutor seemingly suffers from a selective amnesia as he had conveniently forgotten that the self-same poison also killed Inspector Shakeel, and that he too was last seen with a burka-clad woman. Why not the woman, who poisoned Shakeel, was the one who had committed the crimes in Spandan, in her proven absence from it? Since she had no acquaintance, much less a motive to kill the cop, the police should have looked elsewhere for the killer of what appeared to be interconnected crimes. When she reminded the court that logic was a double-edged sword that cuts both ways, Reddy said peevishly that she would have killed Shakeel too to advance such an argument; but the magistrate, by no means amused with that wondered why the police failed to pursue that line of investigation since the identity of the burka-clad woman, last seen with the cop, was relevant to the investigation of the other two cases.

As a tamed Reddy said that he had no more to add, the magistrate opined that while the accused at large might hamper the investigation, it was not a fair proposition either to interrogate her without any compelling reason, but at the same time as he has to take the public interest also into account, he ruled that Kavya might remain in the judicial custody for four weeks, before which the police should produce prima-facie evidence, if any, against her, failing which she would be entitled to seek a regular bail thereafter.

 Thanking the magistrate for his fair order, when Kavya submitted that any police presence in her precincts was inimical to her public image, Simon volunteered to withdraw the guard forthwith. 

 

Chapter 23

Depressing